Wikileaks founder, "hacktivist" and whistleblower, Julian Assange is no stranger to the criminal justice system.

By age 16, he had become a skilled hacker and the home he shared with his single mother was raided following a report to police that he had been complicit in stealing $500,000 from Citibank, but he was never charged.

Assange seemed to work within a self-imposed set of strict ethical guidelines where he did not damage or crash the systems he hacked, instead, seeking information to assuage his self-attributed motivation of power. Knowledge is power, after all.

When he was 20, the Australian Federal Police had him on their radar, setting up an investigation into the hacking group he and two others had set up called The International Subversives. His phone was tapped, his home was raided again and in 1994 he was charged with hacking and fraudulent use of the telecommunications network.

While he pled guilty, he was not sentenced to prison, instead being burdened with a $2100 fine and a good behaviour bond, largely due to his lack of mercenary or malicious intent.

But not all of his work involved raging against the machine. In 1993, he supported the VicPol Child Exploitation Unit to prosecute those responsible........

© Canberra Times